The Republican Party has become the nation’s repository for low-information-voters (LIVs). Its evolution into its present form started in the late 1960s when it initiated its “southern strategy”; i.e. after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 it started to wean southern segregationists from what had been the Southern Democratic party’s “Solid South” – the “Dixiecrats.”

These new Republicans were often “single-issue” voters. No matter what other concerns they might have they would tend to support the candidate who, through overt or covert signals, validated their own biases.

Over the years other disgruntled groups were brought into the Republican fold; anti-abortionists, creationists, homophobes, anti-immigrationists, and others. The addition of these groups expanded the party’s platform to include their concerns as planks. LIVs are today’s counterpart of the Nativists and “Know-Nothings” of the 19 th century

But one shouldn’t conclude that inclusion of the concerns of the LIVs has in any degree caused the power structure of the Republican Party to moderate its longstanding goal of privatizing every Federal program that could conceivably result in a profit for some wealthy interest. Rank and file voters are simply warm bodies to provide votes to elect candidates who will do the bidding of the oligarchies.

The big kahuna of government programs to be privatized is Social-Security/Medicare with 3 trillion dollars of current assets and scores of trillions of dollars of future income to be controlled by a very small group of oligarches, primarily multi-billionaire Wall Street bankers and investors.

The Postal Service is another multi-trillion dollar business that’s on the table for total privatization (its current status is that of a semi-private corporation tightly controlled by specific Federal laws). We have recently seen congressional Republicans enacting provisions that will result in dissolution of the Service as a government managed operation and its reestablishment as a privately owned company much like UPS or FedEx. … READ MORE